Yesterday, I analyzed the 2013 passing numbers for strength of schedule. Today, we look at the best and worst games of the year, from the perspectives of both the quarterbacks and the defenses.

Let’s start with the top 100 passing games from 2014. The top spot belongs to Philadelphia’s Nick Foles, for his monstrous performance against Oakland. Foles threw for 406 yards and 7 touchdowns on just 28 pass attempts. Even including his one one-yard sack, Foles averaged a whopping 18.79 ANY/A in that game. The league-average last season was 5.86 ANY/A, which means Foles was 12.93 ANY/A above average. Now since the game came against the Raiders, we have to reduce that by -1.29, which was how many ANY/A the Raiders defense was below average. So that puts Foles at +11.64; multiply that by his 29 dropbacks, and he produced 337 adjusted net yards of value above average after adjusting for strength of schedule. That narrowly edges out the other seven-touchdown game of 2013, which came at the hands of Peyton Manning against Baltimore on opening night.

The third spot goes to Drew Brees in a week 17 performance against Tampa Bay. The 4th best game of 2013 was a bit more memorable: Tony Romo takes that prize in a losing effort, the insane week five shootout against Manning and the Broncos (Peyton’s performance checks in at #32). The table below shows the top 100 games of 2013, although for viewing purposes, it displays only the top 10 by default (all tables, as usual, are fully searchable, expandable, and sortable).

What about the worst games of the year? Blaine Gabbert narrowly edges out EJ Manuel for the worst performance of 2013. Hooray? Gabbert gained just 71 net yards on 41 dropbacks against the Chiefs in week one — and threw two interceptions — giving him an ANY/A of -0.46. That gave Gabbert a Relative ANY/A of -6.32 for that game; the Chiefs had a slightly tougher than average defense, so his SOS-adjusted RANY/A moves up to -6.18. Over 41 dropbacks, that means Gabbert produced 254 Adusted Net Yards below average, after adjusting for strength of schedule.

Manuel’s performance against Tampa Bay was nearly as bad. He gained more yards, but threw four interceptions against the Bucs, giving him an ANY/A of -0.83. He had an SOS-adjusted RANY/A of -6.3, but with one fewer dropback, he gets a score of -252 for that game. The table below shows the worst 100 games of the year.

One last note on the worst games: I would have thought Ryan Tannehill’s game against Buffalo — one of the worst ever — would have been higher on the list. But it’s only #44 on the list, and not even the worst Tannehill game in the final two weeks of the season. There are two reasons for that: one, the Buffalo defense was pretty darn good. And two, while Tannehill’s game was miserable from a “move the ball” standpoint, he had no interceptions. That helps him out in ANY/A (the original post looked at NY/A), but it remains one of the worst games by a quarterback without throwing a pick.

What about the top defensive game of the year? This one’s easy: it came out of the NFC West, but not from either of the teams you’re thinking of. Matt Ryan had a better season than people realize, but he did have one outlier game that was a real stinker: against Arizona, he had 65 dropbacks but gained just 265 yards and threw four interceptions. The Cardinals defense was outstanding that day, limiting Ryan to just 1.62 ANY/A. And since Ryan was an above average quarterback in 2013, that gave Arizona’s pass defense a value of +308, the best single-game performance of the year. Seahawks fans, calm down: they do claim two of the next three spots on the list.

Foles again tops this table, but the ratings won’t — and are not expected to — perfectly match up with the ratings in table 1. For example, Case Keenum’s game against the Colts in week 9 was the 18th best of the year: 350 yards, 3 TDs, and no interceptions on 35 dropbacks will do that. Since it came against the Colts, only a slightly downward modification for SOS is necessary. That was in Table 1. But in Table 4, we look and see that the Colts allowed Case freakin’ Keenum to do that. Since the SOS adjustment here is stronger, Indianapolis gets credited with the 5th worst defensive performance of the season.

There is a methodological point in creating Rearview ANY/A that needs to be addressed. To come up with strength of schedule-adjusted ratings, you need to adjust each quarterback for the quality of the defense and each defense for the quality of the quarterback. Doing this for defenses is easy, as there are no sample size problems. But for quarterbacks, if a passer has 20 passes against one team, and no passes against any other team, what rating do you give him? If he averaged 10.0 ANY/A against that team, the defense wouldn’t be penalized for that, because the system would assume that he was a 10.0 ANY/A player.

To counter that, I combined all quarterbacks who had fewer than 100 passes last year into one Pseudo QB. The Pseudo QB was sometimes good but mostly very bad. On average, the Pseudo QBs produced an SOS-adjusted Relative ANY/A of -2.67. In the table above, featuring the top 100 defensive games, just two games came against Pseudo QBs, and both of those instances were Gabbert. It’s hard to have a great game against a Pseudo QB, of course, because of the SOS adjustment, but Gabbert was just that bad in those games. In the worst 100 games, four Pseudo QB performances show up. The defense is given an SOS adjustment of -2.67 in those games, assuming that all Pseudo QBs are created equally. The four are: Kyle Orton against Philadelphia, Tarvaris Jackson in relief against Jakcsonville, Chase Daniel against the Chargers, and Scott Tolzien against New York. This is just a footnote, of course, but I wanted to explain what was going on and to highlight why those four Qbs each have a rating of -2.67. [↩]

Many of the conclusions on this website depend on the design of the number called ANY/A.

If there were a reader who did not agree with the design of ANY/A, then that would undermine many of the conclusions here.

I wish there were a way to read the method for adjusting by strength of opponent which is not specific to ANY/A. A function that would also work with Passer Rating, NCAA Passing Efficiency Formula, ESPN Total QBR, or any other replacement for the ANY/A.

http://Nflsgreatest.co.nf Bryan Frye

One that treats pick sixes as if they are sometching a QB has control over, and weights a QB’s performance in the Super Bowl more than it does than entire regular season?

Every football statistical method rewards and punishes people for things they have no control over, including whatever is on your website. Quarterbacks have no control over the offensive line, whether or not people get open, whether or not people catch the pass, and a lot of other things.

The usual procedure is to look at 100% regular season and 0% post season. Anyone who counts the post season more than 0% is an improvement over most of what people say about football.

http://nflsgreatest.co.nf/ Bryan Frye

Pretty sure Chase includes postseason stats in his GQBOAT rankings… and does so quite well, I might add.

David

Maybe if ESPN would share their QBR formula…

and its been well documented that NFL passer rating is flawed.

http://nflsgreatest.co.nf/ Bryan Frye

I think that even if ESPN shared the formula, most fans wouldn’t have access to much of the raw information that goes into it. I really believe most fans are content to not do too much thinking. They like the way ESPN does things. I mean, John Clayton has more Twitter followers than FP, FO, PFF, and FBG combined. I know that isn’t a scientific way of counting things, but it gives a basic idea of what people want to see and how much they want to think.

For my money, Chase’s FPPR is superior to ANY/A or NFL Passer Rating (or CHFF’s Real QBR). I am biased, but of course I prefer my own rating (TQR) that takes rushing plays and fumbles into account and doesn’t overvalue completion rate.

This gives you, basically, an adjusted yards per play. In order to provide a cozy number that NFL fans are used to seeing, I just multiply that by 15 (which sounds like a lot until you realize the NFL multiples by 16.67 to get their Passer Rating).

Obviously, just using stats that you can find on PFR limits you from including things like Peyton Manning moving a slot receiver to the end of the LOS to pick up a blitz, but what are you gonna do?

Nathan

That’s a neat formula, do you mind if use it? I run an online text based football game, and I’d love to try to have a better basis for rating qbs. Right now most players user ANY/A

http://nflsgreatest.co.nf/ Bryan Frye

Go for it, my friend. I feel that we football nerds are all in this together.

Nathan

Thank you, I think the players will really like it. Am I correct that TQR stands for “Total Quarterback Rating”?

This is why pages and pages of stats are so boring. Tony Romo on paper rocked the NFL (fantasy) world vs Denver. Then he threw a pick that beheaded him. That’s the lasting memory of that game. Romo’s performance was bafflingly bad. Makes all these stats look like, well, paper.